Choppies to spend $55m in expansion drive

Botswana’s budget retailer Choppies Enterprises’ Chief Executive said this week the supermarket chain plans to spend 570-million pula ($55-million) to open more stores in Africa over the next 15 months.

Choppies, a no-frills retailer which has 202 stores in towns often too small to attract larger competitors such as South Shoprite, reported a 47 percent drop in half-year profits for the six months to end-December.

Though profit after tax narrowed to 55-million pula, Ramachandran Ottapathu said his firm would expand in the seven countries it already operates in. He said the capital expenditure in Botswana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique would be funded mostly from internal cash flow.

He said;

“We are not shaken by the drop in profit after tax fall as the company is in a growth phase.”

The company plans to spend 120-million pula up to June this year and a further 450-million pula in the full-year until June 2018.

Ottapathu said Choppies, which makes around half of its sales in Botswana, plans to open 36 new stores in 2017. Choppies shares on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange, where the firm has a secondary listing, rose 6.35 percent to 3.35 rand ($1 = 10.4712 pula).